The City in the Middle of the Night

By: Charlie Jane Anders

Narrated by: Jennifer O'Donnell, Laura Knight Keating

Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's Summary

"If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams.... And from there, it's easy to control our entire lives." 

January is a dying planet - divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk. 

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside. 

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal. 

But fate has other plans - and Sophie's ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.  

©2019 Charlie Jane Anders (P)2019 Recorded Books

Critic Reviews

"An even stronger novel than Anders’ Nebula Award-winning All the Birds in the Sky; a tale that can stand beside such enduring works as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion." (Booklist, starred review)

One of the best S-F novels I've ever read!!!

Over the past 60 years, I have read somewhere between 500 and 1,000 science fiction novels. I'm trying to think of the novels that have been better than this one. The only ones that come to mind are the I Robot series and City. This novel is unlike any others that I've ever read. The author has a wonderful imagination and her writing is impeccable. Unfortunately, it ends without ending. Like so many science fiction novels written recently, it seems like a Book 2 is in the works. I certainly hope so.

Truly Alien Science Fiction

There's a lot of science fiction out there and I can't claim to have read all of it. But in my experience most of what I read or see either takes a lot from real life or other works, but "The City in the Middle of the Night" felt refreshingly new, sometimes in ways that pointed out things I didn't even realize I was taking for granted. It feels truly "alien" in a very good way.

An indeterminate amount of time in the future, humanity took to the stars and colonized a planet called January. Being tidally locked to its sun, one side is always day and the other is always night. Right on the border between the two is where people have somehow figured out how to live, but that also means that there is no movement of the sun to indicate the passage of time. Other life lives there and while the humans have given them names like "crocodiles", they resemble nothing like what's on Earth. Picking up generations later where very little of life before January is remembered and the technology that brought them there and that is keeping them alive starts to break down, the book focuses on two very different outcast women, Sophie and Mouth, and how they learn, love, and grow on this harsh planet.

Without giving too much of the plot away, a lot of effort was clearly put by author Charlie Jane Anders into making January feel like a realistic place that could, in desperate times, be where people choose to live. As January has no visible passage of time, the book ends up indicating no passage of time that the reader can recognize. This means that it is intentionally unclear how much time has passed during most parts of the book - the characters' ages are unknown and the events of the book can take anywhere from a few months to several years. This may sound annoying, but as an intentional choice I believe it adds to the alien nature of January (and the name "January" furthers the idea that it's stuck in time). And two different cities are focused on, one that makes its own time and forces all residents to follow routine and another that is anarchy in comparison, everything happening all at once. And each city also has its own language that is similarly structured, further adding to the world-building. And of course the aliens themselves, once explored in some real detail, are truly unlike anything I've seen or read elsewhere.

Anders also does a good job of creating characters to live in this world that 1) feel like they legitimately live here but also 2) feel very relatable in terms of how they feel and behave. Sophie's and Mouth's emotional attachments make up a huge part of the book and often act to further the plot, but without the book simply feeling like it's just about the trials of their hearts (or without feeling like either of them or their problems are the same as the other). I personally wasn't able to relate overly much to either of them, but I don't feel like that took anything away from their stories. And by the time the book is at its completion, it has taken some seriously strange and very interesting twists and turns, though nothing that feels unearned - one part I thought would be a bigger focus of the plot (and in a different situation could have made an entire book itself), but that it was more or less glossed over was actually quite appropriate for the character.

The book is narrated by Jennifer O'Donnell and Laura Knight Keating, with Keating taking Sophie's first-person, present-tense chapters and O'Donnell taking Mouth's third-person, past tense chapters. The different narrations add to the differences between the characters and while it could have easily been done by a single narrator, giving the two women different physical voices was a nice touch, with each voice doing a good job of matching their respective characters. There are a few minor pronunciation differences between the two, but nothing that I think hurts the book.

Anders has said that this is a standalone novel and while I believe you could tell plenty more stories on January, I'm fine seeing it go. If her next novel has the same world-building, attention to detail, and realistic characters I'll be sure to check it out.

A grand idea that collapses on itself

Plot is almost non-existent under weight of philosophical quandaries, extensive worldbuilding, and unnatural dialogue. There are plenty of ideas (too many) such as history vs. future, sharing vs. imposing, structure vs. freedom, and what exactly makes us human that wind up filling 10+ hours of recording. Even climate change becomes important. But while that's going on the reader is stuck wandering around the planet January without much to do. The Gelet, a native species that seems so important in the beginning, is relegated to the sidelines until the last fifth of the book! Instead we're stuck listening to Sophie, Bianca, Mouth, and Alyssa have ever more cyclical arguments and discussions about the same questions, the same debates. And some of these conversations last 20 minutes (while listening faster than normal!!) while in the middle of a pirate fight, and one character is effectively drowning. The author clearly had grand ideas about how to explore some fantastic existential questions and even draws metaphorical parallels to today's society, but it all collapses under excruciatingly poor pacing, lackluster characters, unbelievable dialogue, and a world so big that the ideas are lost to the night.

Pass

I really enjoy this author and her narrative style. She put a lot into world building and relationship arcs that I appreciate. She takes a lot of consideration with language development, power and gender dynamics and it shows. However, this book just fell flat. I was well into part 4 and just accepted I couldn't get through the whole thing. The plot wasn't getting any better and it was time to call it a loss. I don't think it's a complete waste of time. I just felt that the story was underdeveloped. There was no drive to invest in what happened with the characters after getting through a few chapters. There are a lot of admirable creative aspects here, the application just fell short.

Colonization on an inhospitable world

Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night is a tale of planetary colonization under less than optimal conditions. Although never formally stated, the colonists have no form of contact with their Earth ancestors, nor even with the orbiting colony ship which appears as a lifeless satellite. Humanity is limited to a narrow band of land between the light and dark regions of a tidally locked planet. Multiple generations have passed and scientific knowledge is gradually being lost. There are two main cities with one enforcing a strict set of rules for conduct (there is no night and day) and even activity specific scrip. A young girl ends up being left for dead, but is saved by enigmatic creatures that live in the darker regions (where humans cannot survive). Through a series of random events, she ends up in the other city which is slightly more technologically advanced, but controlled by criminal gangs. Her tale is intermixed with another woman who is the remnant of a nomadic group that went back and forth between the cities. The native creatures end up possessing an intelligence, but decidedly different communications capability. In the end this is another planet that humanity manages to foul up.

Much of the focus is on the harsh environmental conditions with survival limited to a narrow strip of land between freezing and boiling. The lack of a routine day/night cycle offers some unique aspects. There is also the gradual decay of technology and technological knowledge and the resulting devolution into totalitarian authority. Sadly, the focus on the indigenous intelligence doesn't come until nearly three-quarters through the tale. In addition, the appreciation of the interplay with humans and environmental collapse is offered near the end without much consequence. While the understated dual lesbian romances are the basis for much of drivers of the subsequent actions, both main characters seem to constantly make bad decisions that eventually just become annoying. Neither seems to do much growing up.

The narration is passable with less than optimal character distinction.

Definitely returning this.

Short review: Story tries to get you involved in a political drama, but the real story is the native aliens trying to fix the planet. Plot has holes out the wazoo. Sophie is the main character, but has the personality of a piece of chalk. Story ends without any sort of resolution to anything. Neither of the narrators gave any emotional depth to anything, which is a first for me.

Long review: When you finally give in and try to follow the political story, the climax ends up happening off-screen. And then you are waiting for the real climax, of the lazily written alien-transformation-terraforming-tentacle vision story, and just when you think you're getting somewhere, the book ends. I don't know if there's a second book. I hope not.
Everyone in the book loves the main character, Sophie, but the story gives us no reason to. She's silent almost the entire story. After their harrowing journey across the Sea of Murder, Alyssa is apparently "dying to see her (Sophie) again" and "misses her so much", even though the two characters don't so much as look at each other the entire way. Mouth and Alyssa's stories are WAY more interesting (honestly, the book should be about Mouth). Author doesn't even bother to describe Sophie physically until halfway through the book.
The possibility of some LGBT representation in this book intrigued me, but ended up being just a tool to keep the main character blind to how awful her "love interest" is. (Sorry, but no one is that stupid. Bianca is either a psychopath, or just trash.)
When her affections are finally revealed, the reaction is typical YA "monster!!" "unnatural!!" "disgusting and perverted!!" bull****. What a letdown.
There are so many better sci-fy/fantasy books out there that use this style of world building, have excellent character development, and have actual wlw/mlm/bi/trans/poly inclusion, if that's what you're looking for. I HIGHLY suggest the "Broken Earth" series, which has all of these things.

Schlocky melodrama

I tried to like this book. I really did. But it’s just not good. The characters don’t make sense. The science is thin. I just got to the part where two characters are at risk of dying, and one of them whispers “you are safe in my love” over and over. So cheesy. So dumb. I just had to stop. First audiobook I’ve ever given up on. First review I’ve ever written. Please please save your time and money. Find something else.

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!

OMG ! this is the worst sci fi book ever. The entire book is a long tedious female emotional roller coaster... There are one or two interesting sci fi portions but those are relegated to the back with at the forefront the constant female emotions of the four female protagonists. A third into the book I had enough, but I'd figured that perhaps this nonsense was going to change and real scifi stuff was coming. Well, it didn't really. I ended up finishing the book to see how bad it really is and I was not disappointed, it sucked until the end.

Would not recommend.

I’m surprised this is the same author as the one who wrote All The Birds in the Sky. It honestly felt like this book was written by a college student in a fiction writing class. The characters were undeveloped and predictable. The themes and lessons are clunky and you get clubbed in the face by the same messages of nonviolence and communication over and over and over and over and over. The plot is thin and events are frequently unconnected and sporadic. This was literally the first book I’ve ever listened to that I wanted to stop listening to but I finished it to see if there was something at the end that would make it all worth it. There wasn’t.

Clumsy young adult scifi

Premise is promising, a tidally locked world with an authoritarian culture that has allowed settlers to survive the harsh conditions. Day and night are places, not times. An alien race lurking in the darkness. However, the characters are all young adults that act and talk like pre-teens having a sleepover party. The dialog is eye rolling, the story ambles along in a very predictable way, and the alien race are a hyperbole of the noble savage trope. Would not recommend.

excellent but truncated

I really envied this but it felt like it finished a chapter early and was a bit abrupt

Irritating characters

wanted to like it, and loved the world it was set in, but find the main characters pretty irritating and have up half way.